The childish old fates played one of their cheapest jokes on Jim Dyckman when, after they had dangled Charity Coe just out of his reach for a lifetime, they flung her at his head. They do those things. They waken the Juliets just a moment too late to save the Romeos and themselves.

Jim had revered Charity as far too good for him, and now everybody wondered if he would do the right thing by her. Prissy Atterbury in a burst of chivalry said it when he said:

“Jim's no gentleman if he doesn't marry Charity.”

Pet put it in a more womanly way:

“Unless he's mighty spry she'll nab him. Trust her!”

Among the few people who had caught a glimpse of Charity, no one had been quite cruel enough to say those things to her face, but Charity imagined them. Housed with her sick and terrified imagination for companion, she had imagined nearly everything dismal.

And now, when, by the mere laws of gravitation, she had floated into Jim Dyckman's arms for a moment, she heard the popular doom of them both in the joke he attempted:

“Charity, I've got to marry you to make you an honest woman.”

She wrenched free of his embrace with a violence that staggered him. He saw that she was taking his effort at playfulness seriously, even tragically.

“No, no, Jim!” she gasped. “I've brought you enough trouble and enough disgrace. I won't let you ruin your life by marrying me out of pity.”

“Pity! Good God!” Jim groaned. “Why, you don't think I meant that, do you? I was just trying to be funny, because I was so happy. I'll promise never to try to be funny again. It was like saying to Venus, 'You're a homely old thing, but I'll let you cook for me'; or saying to—whoever it was was the Goddess of Wisdom, 'You don't know much, but'—Why, Charity Coe, you're Venus and Minerva and all the goddesses rolled into one.”

Charity shook her head.

He roared: “If it's pity you're talking about, isn't it about time you had a little for me? Life won't be worth a single continental damn to me if I don't get you.”

Charity had needed something of this sort for a long time. It sounded to her like a serenade by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Her acknowledgment was a tearful, smileful giggle-sob:

“Honestly?”

“Honest-to-God-ly!”

“All right, as soon as you're a free man fetch the parson, for I'm pretty tired of being a free woman.”

Jim had learned from McNiven that a part of his freedom, when he got it, would be a judicial denial of the right to surrender it for five years. He had learned that if he wanted to marry Charity he must persuade her over into New Jersey. It did not please Jim to have to follow the example of Zada and Cheever, and it hit him as a peculiar cruelty that he and Charity had to accept not only an unearned increment of scandal in the verdict of divorce, but also a marriage contrary to the laws of New York.

New York would respect the ceremonies of New Jersey, but there would be a shadow on the title. Still, such marriages were recognized by the public with little question, just as in the countries where divorce is almost or quite impossible society of all grades has always countenanced unions not too lightly entered into or continued. In such countries words like “mistress,” “concubine,” and “morganatic wife” take on a decided respectability with a touch of pathos rather than reproach.

Jim had come to beg Charity to accept a marriage with an impediment. He had expected a scene when he proposed a flight across the river and a return to Father Knickerbocker with a request for pardon. But her light suggestion of a religious ceremony threw him into confusion. He mumbled:

“Is a parson absolutely necessary?”

Charity's lips set into a grim line.

“I'll be married by a parson or I'll not be married at all. The Church has enough against me on account of my divorce and this last ghastly thing. To get married outside the Church would cut me off entirely from everything that's sacred. There won't be any difficulty about getting a parson, will there?”

“Oh no, not at all!” Jim protested, “only—oh no, not at all, except—”

“Only what? Except what?”

“You'll have to go to New Jersey to be married.”

“Why should I?”

“Entirely on my account, honey. It's because I'm in disgrace.”

This way of putting it brought her over that sill with a rush. To be able to endure something for him was a precious ability. She hugged him devoutly, then put his arms away.

When he left her he had a brilliant inspiration. He thought how soothing it would be to her bruised heart, what carron-oil to her blistered reputation, if he got Doctor Mosely to perform the ceremony. Jim was so delighted with the stroke of genius that he went immediately to the pastor's house. The dear old man greeted him with a subdued warmth.

“This is an unusual privilege, dear boy. I haven't seen you for—oh, ever so long. Of course, I have read of you—er—that is—what—to what am I indebted for—”

“You perform marriages, don't you?”

“That is one of my perilous prerogatives. But, of course, I can't guarantee how well my marriages will wear in these restless times.”

Jim braved a flippancy: “Then, being an honest dealer, you replace any damaged article, of course?”

“I am afraid I could hardly go so far as that.”

“Could you go as far as New Jersey?”

“In my time I have ventured into Macedonia. But why do you ask?”

“You see, in a day or two, I'll be free from my present—that is, my absent wife; and I wanted to know if you could come over and marry me.”

“But I thought—I fear—do you mean to say you are marrying some young woman from over there?”

“I'm marrying Charity Coe.”

“My dear, dear boy! Really! You can't, you know! She has been divorced and so have you.”

“Yes, all quite legally.”

“And you ask me to join your hands in holy matrimony?”

“No, just plain legal matrimony. I was joined in holy matrimony once, and I don't insist on that part of it again. But Charity wants a clergyman and I don't mind.”

“Really, my son, you know better than to assume this tone to me. You've been away from church too long.”

“Well, if you want to get me back, fasten me to Charity. You know she's the best woman that ever lived.”

“She is a trifle too rebellious to merit that tribute, I fear.”

“Well, give her another chance. She has had enough hard knocks. You ought to go to her rescue.”

“Do you think that to be the duty of the Church?”

“It used to be, didn't it? But don't get me into theology. I can't swim. The point is, will you marry Charity to me?”

“No!”

“Wouldn't you marry her to any man?”

“Only to one.”

“Who's that?”

“Her former husband.”

“But he's married to another woman.”

“I do not recognize that marriage.”

“Good Lord! Would you like to see Charity married to Cheever again?”

“Yes.”

“To Peter Cheever?”

“Yes.”

“Whew! Say, Doctor, that's going it pretty strong.”

“I do not care to discuss the sacraments with you in your present humor.”

“Did you read the trial of that woman last week who killed her husband and was acquitted? Mrs. What's-her-name? You must have read it.”

“I pay little attention to the newspaper scandals.”

“You ought to—they're what make life what it is. Anyway, this woman had a husband who turned out bad. He was a grafter and a gambler, a drunkard and a brute. He beat her and their five children horribly, and finally she divorced him. The law gave her her freedom in five minutes and there was no fuss about it, because she was poor, and the newspapers have no room for poor folks' marriage troubles—unless they up and kill somebody.

“Well, this woman was getting along all right when some good religious people got at her about the sin of her divorce and the broken sacrament, and they kept at her till finally she consented to remarry her husband—for the children's sake! There was great rejoicing by everybody—except the poor woman. After the remarriage he returned to his old ways and began to beat her again, and finally she emptied a revolver into him.”

“Horrible, horrible!”

“Wasn't it? The jury disagreed on the first trial. But on the second the churchpeople who persuaded her to remarry him went on the stand and confessed—or perhaps you would say, boasted—that they persuaded her to remarry him. And then she was acquitted. And that's why the civil law has always had to protect people from—”

Doctor Mosely turned purple at the implication and the insolence. He scolded Jim loftily, but Jim did not cower. He was upheld by his own religion, which was Charity Coe's right to vindication and happiness.

At length he realized that he was harming Charity and not Doctor Mosely. Suddenly he was apologizing humbly:

“I'm very much ashamed of myself. You're an older man and venerable, and I—I oughtn't to have forgotten that.”

“You ought not.”

“I'll do any penance you say, if you'll only marry Charity and me.”

“Don't speak of that again.”

He thought of his old friend and attorney, money. He put that forward.

“I'll pay anything.”

“Mr. Dyckman!”

“I'll give the church a solid gold reredos or contribute any sum to any alms—”

“Please go. I cannot tolerate any more.”

Jim left the old man in such agitation that a reporter named Hallard, who shadowed him, feeling in his journalistic bones that a big story would break about him soon, noted his condition and called on Doctor Mosely. He was still shaken with the storm of defending his ideals from profanation, and Hallard easily drew from him an admission that Mr. Dyckman was bent upon matrimony, also a scathing diatribe on the remarriage of divorced persons as one of the signs of the increasing degeneracy of public morals.

Hallard's paper carried a lovely exclusive story the next morning in noisy head-lines. The other newspapers enviously plagiarized it and set their news-sleuths on Jim's trail. The clergy of all denominations took up the matter as a theme of vital timeliness.

Jim and Charity were beautifully suited to the purposes of both sorts; the newspapers that pulpiteered the news and wrote highly moral editorials for sensation's sake; and the pulpiteers who shouted head-lines and yellow journalism from their rostrums, more for the purpose of self-advertisement than for any devotion to Christly principles of sympathy and gentle comprehension.

Jim was stupefied to find himself once more pilloried and portraited and ballyhooed in the newspapers. But he tightened his jaws and refused to be howled from his path by any coyote pursuit.

His next thought was of the New Jersey clergyman who had married him to Kedzie. He motored over to him.

Jim had told Dr. Mosely that clergymen ought to keep up with the news. He found, to his regret, that the New Jersey dominie did.

He remembered Jim well and heard him out, but shook his head. He explained why, patiently. He had been greatly impressed by the action of the House of Deputies of the Protestant Episcopal Church convened at St. Louis in October, 1916. A new canon had been proposed declaring that “no marriage shall be solemnized in this Church between parties, either of whom has a husband or wife still living, who has been divorced for any cause arising after marriage.”

This meant that the innocent party, as well as the guilty, should be denied another chance. The canon had been hotly debated—so hotly that one preacher referred to any wedding of divorced persons as “filth marriage,” and others were heard insisting that even Christ's acceptance of adultery as a cause for divorce was an interpolation in the text, and that the whole passage concerning the woman taken in adultery was absent from some ancient manuscripts. A halt was called to this dangerous line of argument, and one clergyman protested that “the question of the integrity of the Scriptures is more important than the question of marriage and divorce.” Another clergyman pleaded: “An indissoluble marriage is a fiction. What is the use of tying the Church up to a fiction? It is our business to teach and not to legislate.” Eventually the canon was defeated. But many of the clergy were determined to follow it, anyway.

In any case, not only was Charity divorced, but she had been involved in Jim's divorce, and Jim, as the New Jersey preacher pointed out to him, was denied remarriage even by the civil law of New York. The appeal to New Jersey was plainly a subterfuge, and he begged Jim to give Charity up.

“You don't know what you ask,” Jim cried. “I'll find somebody with a heart!” And he stormed out.